On 10/1/12 12:16 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
On 10/01/2012 12:13 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:
On 30.9.2012, at 15.41, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
As far as intrinsically Condorcet methods go, Ranked Pairs feels
simple to me. The only tricky part is the indirect nature of the
"unless it contradicts what you already affirmed" step.
To me the biggest problem of path based methods is that there is no very
good real life explanation to why chains of pairwise victories are so
important. In real life the idea of not electiong a candidate that would
lose to someone who would lose to someone etc. doesn't sound like an
important criterion (since it doesn't talk about what the candidate is
like or how strong the opposition would be, but about what the set of
candidates and its network of relations looks like). Probably there will
never be a long chain of changes from one winner to another in real
life.
I don't think you need to go into path logic for Ranked Pairs. Rather,
how about this?
"Because of the existence of cycles, it's obvious we need to discard
some of the data. So, what data do we discard? If we have to discard a
one-on-one victory, lets discard those that are as narrow, or involve
as few voters, as possible. Hence, we should go down the list of
one-on-one contests and add the data they give to our order unless it
would produce a cycle. That way, all the decisive contests get counted
first and if we have to throw some away, it's the weaker ones."
my spin is similar. Ranked Pairs simply says that some "elections" (or
"runoffs") speak more loudly than others. those with higher margins are
more definitive in expressing the will of the electorate than elections
with small margins. of course, a margin of zero is a tie and this says
*nothing* regarding the will of the electorate, since it can go either way.
the reason i like margins over winning votes is that the margin, in vote
count, is the product of the margin as a percent (that would be a
measure of the decisiveness of the electorate) times the total number of
votes (which is a measure of how important the election is). so the
margin in votes is the product of salience of the race times how
decisive the decision is.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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